Organic India likely to spend Rs 8 crore a year on digital market

Organic India, which currently enjoys a prominent position in the organic packaged foods and green tea segment, is planning a four-time increase in its digital marketing budget to reach out to the younger consumer base.

The Rs 350-crore brand currently spends around 10-15% of its total revenues on marketing, out of which digital gets a mere 5%. The company is eyeing to become a Rs 500-crore brand by 2020. To expand the consumer base, it's planning to up its digital marketing budget to 15-20% of the total marketing budget.

Abhinandan Dhoke

“We want to scale up our digital spends to at least 15-20% in the coming years. Digital as a platform helps you to do the right kind of communication and connect with consumers. It enables engagement with the consumers and give them more value addition,” said Abhinandan Dhoke, MD & CEO, Organic India.

Today, the company holds a 25% market share in the organised, packaged, organic foods segment and a market share of about 15% in the green tea segment.

“When it comes to green tea, we are not just competing in the organic segment. Even brands like Lipton and Tetley have green tea variants but these products are not organic. But despite being organic, we have to be a part of the larger green tea category,” explained Dhoke.

Speaking about their marketing strategy and the platform that works best for them right now, Dhoke said, “The print medium has really given us huge benefits in the last five to seven years when it comes to marketing and communication. We do not believe in creating high-pitch campaigns, we believe in building awareness and educating the customers through this medium. This is why in print we do more of advertorials, which talk more about certain lifestyle diseases and how products will benefit people.”

The brand is also looking to expand its international footprint by entering the Chinese market. Right now, about 30% of the brand’s revenues come from international sales and 70% from domestic sales.

Organic India also wants to increase its market share in the overall organised organic segment to 30% and wants to occupy a market share of about 20% in the green tea segment in the next two years.

Being an agrarian country, with a tradition rooted in Ayurveda, one would think Organic India’s path toward producing and selling organic products must have been fairly straight-forward. But it was not so.

According to Dhoke, the toughest task was to convince farmers. To do anything, the organisation would have needed farmland, so convincing farmers and making them believe in organic farming was the first hurdle that the brand had to cross, a process that took them months and years. Then came the next phase – actually making the soil of farmlands organic. It takes at least three years for the soil to be completely free of chemicals and be truly organic.

With the initial challenges behind them, it was now time to decide what they would produce in the farmlands.

“We did not want to be ‘me too’ and for that reason we did not want to get into commodities and pulses. We instead focused on cultivating Tulsi with our farmer partners. It took a lot of efforts to convince the farmers to grow Tulsi. In the first decade, following our launch, there was a lot of struggle, especially since we had chosen to grow a product like Tulsi. Not only was it difficult to convince the farmers but it was also a challenge to go out into the market and convince the consumers to buy our products and to ensure that we were able to deliver and cater to the taste of the consumers,” said Dhoke.

In 2005, the organisation added herbal supplements to their product portfolio and in the year 2010 they added packaged goods to their roster of products.

“Again, we did not want to sell products like dal or wheat. So, in our packaged goods we have organic ghee, extra virgin coconut oil, kachi ghani mustard oil, organic cooking oil, quinoa and special spiced tea, which also comes under packaged goods,” said Dhoke.

While green tea and infusions account for 70% of the brand’s revenue, Dhoke believes the packaged goods segment will really take off in the coming years.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com